Stripe YSTE 2026: Designing for a Room Full of Questions

How do you inspire students without talking down to them?

When I was asked to create the opening film for Stripe's first year sponsoring the Young Scientist & Technology Exhibition, the brief was simple: create something that would set the tone for the event and welcome hundreds of students into the room.

As I started exploring ideas, one question kept coming back: how do you inspire a room full of young scientists in a way that feels genuine?

Because Stripe is an Irish company, and the exhibition is such an important part of Ireland's scientific community, it felt natural to tell that story through the lens of Irish innovation. I kept coming back to the idea that many of the discoveries we celebrate today also started as questions, experiments and observations whose importance wasn't fully understood at the time.

That became the foundation for the project. I wanted to celebrate curiosity itself and the possibilities that come from asking questions. More than anything, I wanted students to see themselves not as spectators looking back at history, but as participants in a story that's still being written.

Everything starts with a question

The idea behind the film became surprisingly simple: celebrate the question, not the answer.

Most discoveries only seem inevitable because we already know what came next. But at some point, they were just ideas in progress.

That's what makes the Young Scientist exhibition so special. It's a room full of possibilities, where curiosity matters just as much as the outcome.

Looking back at some of Ireland's biggest discoveries really reinforced that idea. Jocelyn Bell Burnell's work on radio pulsars would eventually contribute to technologies behind wireless communication. Nicholas Callan's induction coil helped pave the way for advances in X-rays and radiotherapy. But before any of that, they were simply questions worth exploring.

Designing a visual language for possibility

Once I landed on the concept, every design decision became a way of supporting it.

The first half of the film focused on Irish scientists and discoveries that have shaped the world around us, so I leaned into a more restrained visual language: monochromatic tones, structured compositions and references to scientific archives and diagrams.

Then, at "And yet... we're just getting started," everything shifts. Colour enters the screen, energy increases, and it transitions into projects created by students from previous exhibitions.

There was a clear visual contrast between the two sections, but I never wanted them to feel separated by time or importance. Scientists and students shared the same visual rhythm, creating a sense of continuity between past discoveries and present curiosity.

Letting the idea lead

The process itself was surprisingly smooth. Once the concept clicked, it became a useful filter for every decision that followed. Whether I was sketching ideas in FigJam, refining storyboards on Figma or building the animation in After Effects, the goal stayed the same: make the transition between past discoveries and present curiosity feel seamless.

In many ways, the motion became part of the message. Every scene was designed to flow into the next, reinforcing the idea that discovery isn't a series of isolated moments, but something continuous and shared across generations.

From radio pulsar to post-punk

One detail I couldn't resist sharing: the same radio pulsar signals associated with Jocelyn Bell Burnell’s work would eventually inspire the artwork for Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures.

It felt strangely perfect for a project built around curiosity. Sometimes discoveries change science. Sometimes they change culture. And sometimes they end up on legendary record sleeves.

A shared sense of curiosity

After the event, one student shared a message that really stayed with me:

"The video that was played in the inauguration ceremony gave me goosebumps and made me realise that we are not competitors, but rather a large family, all with the same motive of making a difference in the world."

For me, that summed up the project better than anything else could.

The idea never was to predict who might make the next big breakthrough. But simply to celebrate the fact that these students are already doing what scientists have always done: asking questions, exploring ideas and building on the work of those who came before them.

And maybe that's enough. Because every discovery, no matter how transformative, once started with someone wondering:

What happens if...?